First Intel tried helping us out buy pointing out the perils of pairing the scary fast Nvidia Ion IGP with the anemic Intel Atom CPU.I am paraphrasing abit but it sounded like this:
‘THE ONLY FANCY GRAPHICS YOU SHOULD LOOK AT ON NETBOOKS IS ASCII ART, ASSHOLE!’
Now they have this friendly guy saying essentially the same thing (more paraphrasing below):
Is this some kind of netbook purist who longs for the days of 7″ screens and pygmy keyboards? Is it not a netbook unless it frustrates you with its pathetic calculator-like performance? Is it wrong to want more value for our money? Can’t he see that the only netbook worth having is the one with an ION chipset?
Now we have Intel’s new wicked-fast mobile CPU the Core i7 but you can only buy it in single GPU systems. It would be ideal in a gaming notebook. When you realize that SLI and Crossfire are the only way to get desktop-level performance from a notebook, you understand the frustration.
What’s holding up the Intel Core i7 17″ gaming notebooks? According to Laptop Magazine its Intel’s reluctance to support SLI. But that says nothing about Crossfire…
Intel has yet to support SLI for its newest CPU
But what about all the fanfare back in August when Intel and Nvidia hooked up to produce an awesome i7 and SLI-packing offspring? Was that hoopla just for the FTC? You never know when the FTC will spring into action…
While we wait for Intel to decide what it wants to do, maybe the propeller heads at AMD could get off their asses and whip up some competition for Intel’s all conquering Core series. AMD’s problem in mobile CPUs is power consumption – so throw the DTR crowd a bone and give us some re-purposed desktop CPU. We don’t care about battery life or fan noise/heat.
Phenom Mobile and three-way Crossfire with a 5200 IGP and two 5870s? I bet that would work quite well.
Does the CPU really matter? In my experience the videocard is always the bootleneck when it comes to laptop gaming.
Then again — I’ve never had a SLI Notebook. When I had my dell 9400 with Overclocked Geforce go 7900, I would sometimes forget to turn off CPU power savings mode and would barely notice… heh.
Actually, on the really high end GPUs you need a fast CPU. The portable gaming crowd really want dual GPU systems with the new Core i7. Intel’s reluctance to allow this on their new platform is a pity and hopefully it gets resolved this month.
On netbooks, Intel is saying that Ion is too much power. That is non-sense. A Broadcom HD decoder might be enough, but Ion works great. Is its essentially the 9400m used in the 8 hour battery life MacBook Pros. So it is not the voracious battery killer Intel portrays.